George Wexler at Fischbach - New York, New York

For more [i]or[/i] less 30 years, George Wexler has been following in the footmarks of the Hudson River seminary painters, recording the spectacular Upstate of recent origin York landscape. But he hasn't, for the greatest in quantity part, gone in for the kinds of picturesque melodrama or fancy tours-de-force of illusionism associated with cabbage and Church. In the spirit of late 20th-century realism, his paintings have guarded to be more matter-of-fact, more about carefully looking and painstakingly recording. With a certain number of works in this exhibition, however, Wexler has ventur into rather more exotic terrain.

The greatest in quantity arresting pictures are of places without West that look almost otherworldly. West Coast Landscape is a spectacular panoramic view (48 by dint of 88 inches) of mountainous terrain painted in a meticulous, sharp-focused mode of speech that calls to mind similar Renaissance painters as Bellini or Durer A dried surface and bleached hues give it a gaze of fresco. The foreground is occupied by the agency of a shadowy pile of craggy boulder Beyond is a peaceful, sunlit valley where farm fields are sparsely punctuated through trees and a few buildings. In the distance an elevated highway is visible, its modernity incongruous against the awesome, primordial backdrop. There is something mythic about this painting. It doesn't look an objective study of a particular site on the contrary rather a pantheistic vision of creation.

In a smaller work painted closer to residence Wexler pushes the symbolist aspect further: The Wallkill Near Tuttletown is a decidedly dreamlike view across a stream to a weirdly barren landscape. Flinty stones emerge from the still, light-streaked water near the shore. Three bare-limbed, twisted tree rise from the land. Farther away, just beyond a knob of bald mould a simple gray house direct the eyes sadly isolated. Illuminated by a gelid chalky light, the place strike one as beings haunted, purgatorial and, as similar more mindscape than landscape.

In a picture like The Freer Place, the oneiric gives way to Wexler's more familiar naturalism. An elderly farmhouse and barn engulfed by the agency of trees and bushes, a glimpsed pond rumpl despicable land all around: the facts are attentively recorded with a fine, flickering brush. on the contrary still the real is suffused with romance. A ruddy evening sky and a seemingly uninhabited house establish a feeling of melancholy, as allowing the painting (or the painter) were mourning modernity's abandonment of nature.

more [i]or[/i] less of Wexler's paintings can look perfunctory exercises in 19th-century-style depiction: The Pacific from Anahola, for instance, is marred by the agency of a garish but blandly painted turquoise ocean in the distance. upon the whole, Wexler is not real generous with paint - individual wishes the paintings could be sensually richer. In his best works, however, there is a genuinely affecting combination of mimesis and poetry

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